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Research Summary

Current Status

PhD (full-time) - currently registered

Research Topic

Picturing the Civil War: The Visual Culture of the Rank-and-File

Research Summary

My thesis argues for the first time that both northern and southern soldiers employed visual culture to represent themselves and their experiences during the American Civil War. I argue that visual culture reimagined the 'citizen-soldier': a non-professional volunteer who fuses martial and civil identities in times of national crisis to embody republican values. This thesis will prove that citizen-soldiers soldiers forged and employed innovative ways of representing both their temporal martial identities and the unfamiliar circumstances of the conflict in which they were engaged. Visual culture aided Civil War soldiers in managing and comprehending the unparalleled traumas of conflict during a transition in military history towards impersonal and dehumanising modern warfare.

The thesis will examine various aspects of the Civil War soldiers' experience of the conflict. In order to achieve this, I will examine visual culture including photographs, paintings, sketches, and ephemera in conjunction with textual sources. Whilst scholars have examined the representation of conflict in journalistic sketches, memorials, and conventional battlefield photojournalism by professional artists and photographers, there is a notable dearth on how soldiers themselves visually represented their circumstances. I will also engage with visual sources created by African American and immigrant soldiers, who are often rendered peripheral in our understanding of the conflict.

The project will position visual culture more centrally in the study of the American Civil War. It also positions soldiers, including those ethnic groups relegated in their significance by historians, at the heart of the first modern war and its visual culture. As these common agents represented their circumstances, they contributed to a watershed in American self-representation; when the U.S. transitioned from being a textual nation to a visual one.

Research Interests

Nineteenth century U.S. military history; nineteenth century U.S. visual culture; nineteenth century U.S. social culture; epistolary studies; material culture; death culture; U.S. slavery and emancipation.

Research Supervisors

Doctor Robin Vandome

Professor Zoe Trodd

Research Institutes and Clusters

British Association for American Studies

British Association for Nineteenth Century Historians

Print and Visual Culture at the University of Nottingham, since September 2014

Race and Rights at the University of Nottingham, since September 2014

Primary Funding Sources

Midlands3Cities (M3C) PhD Studentship, 2015-18

School of Cultures, Languages, and Area Studies (CLAS) MRes Studentship, 2014-15

Research Activities

MRes thesis archival research trip to St. Bonaventure University, NY and the Brooklyn Historical Society, NY, August 2015, funded by CLAS Postgraduate Research Fund, University of Nottingham.

PhD thesis archival research trip to the Virginia Historical Society, the Richmond National Battlefield Park Historical Archive, and William and Mary's SWEM Library Special Collections, April-May 2016, funded by M3C SDF.

Research Fellowship at the Library of Congress, February-May, 2017, funded by the AHRC International Placement Scheme and M3C SDF.

Papers/Presentations

'"The Last and Most Precious Memento:" Portrait Photography and the Union Citizen-Soldier,' paper delivered at Emerging Civil War Symposium, St. Bonaventure University, New York, 2015, funded by CLAS Postgraduate Research Fund, University of Nottingham.

'"Who Would Be Free Must Strike the Blow:" African American Visual Culture in the Civil War," paper delivered at public panel, Race, War and Imagery, Waterstones, Nottingham, 2015.

'"An Eagle on His Button:" African American Photographic Portraiture of the Civil War,' paper delivered at public lecture, 'Race, Masculinity, and Citizenship: A Dialogue on the American Civil War,' the University of Nottingham, Nottingham, 2016.

"The Last and Most Precious Memento:" Portrait Photography and the Union Citizen-Soldier," paper delivered to the BAAS/IBAAS Conference, Belfast, 2016, funded by Midlands3Cities Student Development Fund (SDF).